Saturday, April 30, 2016

I took my two younger children to Antietam today. Ben, 13, has just started getting interested in military history, and Clara just likes to go out and do things, so she happily came along. We went to the visitor's center to watch their 25-minute video, which is quite good, and then visited what to me are the three most evocative parts of the battlefield: the bloody cornfield, the sunken lane, and Burnside Bridge. The bloody cornfield is where the first phase of the battle was fought, a 2½-hour slaughter during which a man was killed or wounded every second. It's still a cornfield, and I've always wondered what they do with the corn they harvest there.

At the sunken lane. The Confederates used this as a ready-made trench, but as I've explained before it is actually a terrible place to defend, and it ended up becoming a trap for hundreds of the men who defended it.

Ben is ready to repel attackers, and Clara is already dead.

They practice contemplative poses.

Up in the observation tower. The views weren't great, because it was a gray, gray day, but it was still fun.

Notice this pigeon happily nesting in among the anti-pigeon spikes.

Confederate's-eye view of Burnside Bridge; an old photo because today it was covered with scaffolding. I explained to Ben that it was defended by Georgians and attacked by New Yorkers. He said,

So it was like, Georgians: "Y'all goan die." New Yorkers: "Fuggetaboutit."

Ice cream at Nutter's in Sharpsburg, an essential part of any trip to Antietam.

Clowning in the National Cemetery. They had a copy of the Gettysburg Address posted on a wall, and we read it aloud together, taking turns. As we walked away Ben said, "It was cool that we did that."

The latest New Yorker features a story by Ian Frazier about Jennie Romer, who is billed as the country's leading expert on legal efforts to ban or tax plastic shopping bags. Romer prefers charging a 5 or 10 cent tax,

because it makes shoppers think about whether they really need the bag and allows them to buy it if they do. Fees are also easier to defend against legal challenges. Bans, on the other hand, tend to get more support, she said, because voters seem to enjoy banning things.

David Brooks is so upset about Donald Trump's rise that he thinks we need to remake American in response:

We’ll probably need a new national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.

I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.

We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.

We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. . . . what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. . . . The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST.

Has Brooks been unhinged by his divorce, or is he onto something? I go back and forth in my mind about this all the time. Are we in a moment of great crisis, as Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz both seem to think, or is this a pretty decent time with no problems everyone doesn't have? This isn't Syria, or even Greece.

Is capitalist individualistic suburban life a workable system, or does it leave us lacking something crucial that our tribal, hunter-gatherer minds need – community, solidarity, danger, struggle – leading to an awful spiritual malaise?

The world economy is, I think, a machine so huge and complex that nobody understands it at all. So far it seems that a nation with enough hard-working, creative people can still thrive under a range of mixed systems, from half socialist to mostly capitalist. But why that is and what will happen as AI gets smarter and development evens out across the world seems to me anybody's guess.

A society of 300 million people is something even more complex and difficult to improve. Societies do change, but in unpredictable ways, and they always keep big baggage trains of junk from the past. Often the things we would most like to get rid of are the things that linger longest. How would you go about making a society more generous, or more friendly, or more trusting? How would you "change the definition of masculinity" – assuming we share one in the first place?

I think Brooks is asking for changes that can't be willed. I do agree with him, though, that electing Trump president would be a step in exactly the wrong direction

Several Democrats argued that Mrs. Clinton, should she be her party’s nominee, would easily beat Mr. Trump. They were confident that his incendiary remarks about immigrants, women and Muslims would make him unacceptable to many Americans. They had faith that the growing electoral power of black, Hispanic and female voters would deliver a Clinton landslide if he were the Republican nominee.

But others, including former President Bill Clinton, dismissed those conclusions as denial. They said that Mr. Trump clearly had a keen sense of the electorate’s mood and that only a concerted campaign portraying him as dangerous and bigoted would win what both Clintons believe will be a close November election.

Trump confuses everything. A lot of political insiders think he will be a horrible candidate, but then they also thought he would do terribly in the primaries. On the other hand the sort of politicians and strategists who focus on how the candidate and the campaign perform (like Bill Clinton) are very impressed by Trump. In a normal sort of year political scientists say they can predict the winner of the election based on economic data and a couple of poll numbers, but this year will be different because Trump is not an average Republican. He will drive away many who normally vote Republican but may attract many who might otherwise vote Democrat. The Clinton strategy taking shape is, in essence:

She stays calm and presidential and refuses to be drawn into insult duels;

Firing back is done by surrogates like her husband;

Meanwhile her campaign and allies attack Trump savagely with ads based on compilations of the most outrageous and insulting things he has said;

And their opposition research people comb through Trump's business record looking for information they can use to make ads attacking him as an unreliable partner and no friend to working people.

In conclusion, we are in for:

a matchup that operatives on both sides predicted would be an epic, ugly clash between two vastly disparate politicians.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Asked about Cruz during an appearance at Stanford University on Wednesday, Boehner called him “Lucifer in the flesh,” according to the The Stanford Daily.

“I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” Boehner added. He said he would not vote for Cruz in a general election, though he would vote for his fellow tangerine-tinted Republican Donald Trump.

For decades, tourists have visited the historic home of James Monroe outside of Charlottesville, Va., and have encountered the quaint — if not underwhelming — residence of the nation’s fifth president.

Situated in the Blue Ridge, the plantation known as Highland, where Monroe lived from 1799 to 1823, has stood in contrast to another presidential estate on the outskirts of Charlottesville — Monticello, the palatial manse of President Thomas Jefferson.

A 1985 Washington Post article aptly opined that Monroe’s home “bears about the relation to Jefferson’s mansion as does a cottage to a country club.” Monroe himself even described his humble abode as a “cabin castle,” and historians interpreted his modesty as a latent expression of his roots as the son of a wood craftsman.

But an archaeological discovery on the property is rewriting the legacy of Monroe and the place he called home. It turns out that the home preserved on the estate — and marketed for years as the residence where the president laid his head — is in fact a guest quarters. Instead, an archaeological dig on the grounds has revealed a sizable home more than twice the size of the small cottage.

In other words, the home of Monroe was more castle than cabin and likely “in the same order of magnitude” of Jefferson’s Monticello, said Sara Bon-Harper, executive director of Highland, the 535-acre property owned by the College of William and Mary.

Sometimes I wonder how much is really learned by doing archaeology around the standing house of well-documented people, but here is a case where the digging will change how people understand the person.

In the picture at the top you can see what is now known to be the guest house and a piece of the newly discovered foundation. More pictures from the dig below.

Most of the government's data on obesity in American comes from telephone surveys, and those surveys show that the fattest Americans are in the south. But according to this study, southerners are not fatter than other Americans, they are just more honest when medical researchers ask about their weight.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, desperate to alter the course of a presidential primary fight in which Donald J. Trump is closing in on victory, announced Wednesday that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate if he won the Republican nomination.
The move, a day after Mr. Trump scored unexpectedly wide victory margins in sweeping five East Coast states, amounted to the grandest diversionary tactic a presidential candidate can stage — or at least the grandest one available to a candidate trailing by about 400 delegates who failed to win more than 25 percent of the vote in any state on Tuesday.

Carly Fiorina? Really? I guess she had more success talking back to Trump than the other candidates, but otherwise she is just awful.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

I love this polling, inspired by the Trump campaign. Above, the answers given by Republicans. Notice how few chose 2003, the year of Shock and Awe in Iraq.

And Democrats. There was a wrinkle here:

The pattern for supporters of Bernie Sanders was a little different from that of Hillary Clinton supporters: The main difference is that Mr. Sanders’s voters were more likely to pick a year from the 1960s, and more of the Clinton supporters chose best years in the 1990s, when her husband was president.

I have to say that on this I am going with my fellow Hillary supporters and saying 1999.

And then there's this:

In the Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of people over all said America’s greatest years were ahead of it, while 36 percent said those years had already passed.

We just had a weird senate race in Maryland between two Congress-people from the Washington suburbs, Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards. This got played up as an establishment vs. progressive insurgent race, with the well-connected, Hillary-endorsed Van Hollen as the establishment candidate and Edwards as the radical. But really their voting records are all but identical and Edwards had to work hard to create some kind of difference between them. In the end this only made her seem shrill and angry compared to Van Hollen's cool, and he won easily.

Even more interesting was the race to replace Van Hollen in the House. There were eight candidates in the Democratic primary, one of whom, wine importer David Trone, spent $12 million of his own money on the campaign, apparently the most ever spent in a House primary. He lost to state senator and American University law professor Jamie Raskin, who spent a few hundred thousand.

Maryland's 8th District is stocked with federal workers, government contractors, activists, and other such Beltway folks, giving it one of the best informed electorates in the country. In that environment Trone's spending could not overcome Raskin's popularity with progressives and Democratic party insiders. Not that the money accomplished nothing; Trone certainly got his message out, and he came in second. But he couldn't overcome a skilled, well-positioned politician.

The best antidotes to money in politics are 1) a well-informed electorate and 2) an effective party apparatus.

Trump's big wins yesterday came in part because voter turnout among Republicans is way down. Republican turnout was 10% or less of the voting age population in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware, and it was only 6.4% in New York, making them five of the six lowest turnout primary states so far. By comparison, turnout was 17% in Virginia and 22% in Ohio.

So it may not be that undecided voters are gravitating to Trump so much as anti-Trump Republicans are discouraged. Trump faces unusually high levels of intraparty opposition for a front-runner — or at least, he had seemed to until the past two weeks. But Kasich and Ted Cruz are also deeply flawed, and somewhat factional, candidates. It’s asking a lot of voters to cast a tactical vote against Trump when that tactic requires (i) going to a contested convention in order to (ii) deny the candidate with the plurality of votes and delegates the nomination in order to (iii) give the nomination to a candidate they don’t particularly like anyway. The #NeverTrump voters might not be voting for Trump, but they might be staying at home.
They aren't voting for Trump, but they don't like any of the alternatives.

Trump is increasingly likely to be the nominee because there simply is not a credible alternative around whom his opponents can rally. The only candidate with even a mathematical chance of beating him is Cruz, and outside his base of hard-core conservatives he is not very popular. Few Republicans outside the Cruz camp are going to throw their souls into stopping Trump if the result is nominating Cruz.

If we go back to the "lane" model that pundits were using early in the race, it seems to have unfolded like this: because Cruz was a much more formidable candidate than Huckabee or Santorum, he has expanded the evangelical Christian/extremely conservative lane up to around a third of the party, squeezing the other lanes. Meanwhile Trump built his own lane, taking in voters of all ideologies for whom Republicanism is mainly an identity, mainly about whose side your are on and who your enemies are. Trump used his television and twitter skills to take out the candidate he most feared, Jeb Bush, who for his part wilted pathetically under Trump's fire. The reduced establishment lane was for a while divided among several candidates, to the benefit of Cruz and Trump. By the time the dust settled the only surviving establishment candidate was Rubio, who just isn't very impressive. Plus one reason Republicans usually rally around the front-runner is that they like winners, and Trump was clearly winning. So the establishment lane dried up, leaving establishment-oriented Republicans nowhere to go but home.

It's an interesting lesson in how much more complex the variables are for a race with eight real candidates than they are in a race with two or three. It is also a testament to the political skill of Donald Trump, and to the bad state of the national Republican Party.

UPDATE

A bit of confirmation from a paragraph on how politicians in Indiana are reacting to John Kasich's decision not to contest the state:

“I have no idea if I’ll vote for a presidential candidate now,” said Jim Merritt, a state senator from the Indianapolis area who had been inclined to back the Ohio governor. “I am very disappointed.”

Creatures of all phantom company
Who populate the principality
Of that vile dragon creeping
With venom seeping –
Whose high and mighty fundament
Sweeps full one third the stars’ extent –
Gordan, Ingordin and Ingordan:
By the Seal of Solomon,
Magi the Pharaohs call upon,
I now exorcise you
And substantialize you:
By sages three: Caspar,
Melchior and Balthazar:
By David’s playing
For the allaying
Of Saul’s dismaying
And your gainsaying.

I adjure you
And conjure you
By the mandate of the Lord:
Be unkind not,
Hurt mankind not,
Manifest misericord:
Show but once your faces
And retract your traces
With forsaken races
To hell’s hiding places.

I adjure
I conjure
By that awesome
By that fearsome
That gruesome Judgement Day,
When unending punishment
And horror and dismay
And unbounded banishment
Shall drive demonkind
Into damnation
But shrive humankind
Unto salvation.

By that same unnamed, unsaid,
That unutterably dread
Tetragrammaton of God:
Fall to fear and trembling
As to disassembling
I now exorcise
Spectres: demons: ghosts: hobgoblins:
Satyrs: sirens: hamadryads
Nightmares: incubi and
Shades of the departed –
Flee to ruination,
Chaos and damnation,
Lest your foul conflation
Rend Christ’s congregation.

From all our enemies, good Lord, deliver us.

Translated by David Parlett (The Penguin Edition)

The Carmina Burana is a collection of medieval poems in Latin and Middle High German, contained in a single manuscript from a monastery in Bavaria. There are 350 poems in all. I have never read most of them and did not know about this one until just now, and now I wonder what other treasures are buried therein.

Back in January I wrote here about an amusing case that came before the Supreme Court:

Back in 2006, police detective Jeffrey Heffernan of Paterson, New Jersey, was seen carrying around a yard sign for a candidate in the mayoral election. Actually he was just transporting it for his mother, but when the candidate of that sign lost the election Heffernan was demoted to beat cop. He sued. A jury awarded him $105,000, but the judge vacated the verdict, and an appeals court agreed. After all, Heffernan hadn't actually been exercising his First Amendment rights. He was only mistakenly thought to be exercising his First Amendment rights, and the constitution doesn't say anything at all about that.

The justices, in a 6-to-2 decision, said it was unconstitutional to demote a police officer based on the mistaken assumption that he had engaged in political activity.

“When an employer demotes an employee out of a desire to prevent the employee from engaging in political activity that the First Amendment protects, the employee is entitled to challenge that unlawful action,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority, “even if, as here, the employer makes a factual mistake about the employee’s behavior.”

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the link between economic, political, and social conditions and the global phenomenon of ISIS foreign fighters. We find that poor economic conditions do not drive participation in ISIS. In contrast, the number of ISIS foreign fighters is positively correlated with a country's GDP per capita and Human Development Index (HDI). In fact, many foreign fighters originate from countries with high levels of economic development, low income inequality, and highly developed political institutions. Other factors that explain the number of ISIS foreign fighters are the size of a country's Muslim population and its ethnic homogeneity. Although we cannot directly determine why people join ISIS, our results suggest that the flow of foreign fighters to ISIS is driven not by economic or political conditions but rather by ideology and the difficulty of assimilation into homogeneous Western countries.

According to their research the problem is not poverty or unemployment but lack of assimilation.

Monday, April 25, 2016

I'm starting to see stories about people who were once social justice activists but have been driven out by what they see as the intolerance and narrow-mindedness of the movement. Conor Friedersdorf hears from Mahad Olad, a Kenyan immigrant. When he was in high school in Minneapolis, he was an activist in feminist, LGBT, and anti-racism groups, what he called the "social justice scene."

Then he became disillusioned. . . .

“On Twitter,” he wrote, “I discussed how trigger warnings have almost been rendered useless now that they’re used to alert individuals when talking about normal everyday things, like food, cars and animals. And that their use could potentially have adverse effects on academic freedom. I was accused of being outrageously insensitive and apparently made three activist cohorts have traumatic breakdowns.”

“In another tweet,” he added, “I criticized the usual tactic of campus activists to disrupt and heckle controversial speakers and advised them to raise their strong objections during the question and answer session, which lectures usually reserve long hours precisely to debate opponents. This time, the attacks got a little more personal. I was accused of being a ‘respectable negro,’ ‘uncle tom,’ ‘local coon’ and defending university officials to continue to ‘systemically oppress minorities.’”

I asked if he thought his race and ethnicity made it easier or harder to dissent. “A little easier, I guess,” he replied, “But it really doesn't feel good being a called a ‘house nigger.’”

He says he was ultimately kicked out of student-led social justice groups.

Obviously I know nothing about this young man beyond what he has told reporters, and maybe there is much left out of his story. But as I said I am hearing more rumblings like this, from people who support the cause but can't abide the atmosphere in these activist groups. Can young activists find a way to expand their tent and keep people of different temperments working together, or are we headed for another ugly crack-up like the one that crippled so many activist groups from the 60s?

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Human beings have a habit of searching for clear, simple expressions of hideously complex phenomena. Consider, for example, liberals unhappy with how many blacks are in prison in America. They toss off pseudo-explanations like,

Black people and white people use drugs at “similar rates”, but black people are four times more likely to get arrested for drug crime.

Which one can find repeated in just about every liberal and mainstream media outlet. But this is a gross oversimplification of the situation:

The Bureau of Justice has done their own analysis of this issue and finds it’s more complicated. For example, all of these “equally likely to have used drugs” claims turn out to be that blacks and whites are equally likely to have “used drugs in the past year”, but blacks are far more likely to have used drugs in the past week – that is, more whites are only occasional users. That gives blacks many more opportunities to be caught by the cops. Likewise, whites are more likely to use low-penalty drugs like hallucinogens, and blacks are more likely to use high-penalty drugs like crack cocaine. Further, blacks are more likely to live in the cities, where there is a heavy police shadow, and whites in the suburbs or country, where there is a lower one. . . . Anecdotal evidence suggests white people typically do their drug deals in the dealer’s private home, and black people typically do them on street corners. My personal discussions with black and white drug users have turned up pretty much the same thing. One of those localities is much more likely to be watched by police than the other.

This all comes from a long post about the issue from Slate Star Codex, who read a stack of criminological studies and the like about this issue. The basic finding is that there is a very clear and dramatic racial bias in applying the death penalty, both in that blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death and that the killers of whites are more likely to be sentenced to death. But all the other claims of bias are very hard to prove:

Conviction rates of blacks have generally found to be less than than conviction rates of whites (Burke and Turk 1975, Petersilia 1983, Wilbanks 1987). I don’t know why so many of these studies are from the 70s and 80s, but a more recent Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that 66% of accused blacks get prosecuted compared to 69% of accused whites; 75% of prosecuted blacks get convicted compared to 78% of prosecuted whites.

The 1975 study suggested this was confounded by type of crime – for example, maybe blacks are charged more often with serious crimes for which the burden of proof is higher. The 1993 study isn’t so sure; it breaks crimes down by category and finds that if anything the pro-black bias becomes stronger. For example, 51% of blacks charged with rape are acquitted, compared to only 25% of whites. 24% of blacks charged with drug dealing are acquitted, compared to only 14% of whites. Of fourteen major crime categories, blacks have higher acquittal rates in twelve of them (whites win only in “felony traffic offenses” and “other”).

The optimistic interpretation is that there definitely isn’t any sign of bias against black people here. The pessimistic interpretation is that this would be consistent with more frivolous cases involving black people coming to the courts (ie police arrest blacks at the drop of a hat, and prosecutors and juries end up with a bunch of stupid cases without any evidence that they throw out).

None of which means that our society is not biased against blacks. If it is true, as studies seem to show, that blacks are more likely to commit the kinds of crimes for which we hand out long jail terms, that only changes the question to why they do so, and why we (for example) think that armed robbery is more deserving of punishment than bombing nations that haven't attacked us.

One of the most striking things about crime and punishment in America is how much more vindictive we are than Europeans or Japanese. I believe the reason that Americans are so much more supportive of savagely punishing criminals is that we are more likely to see criminals as Other (especially black or immigrant) rather than part of our own community.

But this is subtle and hard to explain, and so we reach for simple, numerical "facts" that really aren't true at all.

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887) was apprenticed at 13 to a Parisian goldsmith and for years made his living doing designs for manufacturers. In 1850 he moved to England, where he lived for five years, designing pieces for the Minton China Works, Wedgwood, and other firms. (Girl in a Hat Decorated with Wheat)

After his return to Paris in 1855 he began to enter sculptures in the salons, and he hit the big time in 1863 when the emperor bought one of his works. (The Abduction of Hippodamie, 1871)

But even though he began to get commissions for major public statues he continued to design works for reproduction or use in lamps and the like. (Bust of a Young Woman)

Carrier-Belleuse in his prime, looking like the perfect 19th-century French artiste.

Angel Chained to a Rock (1866), a work that made quite a stir in its time and still gets lots of attention online. The metal chain is a characteristic touch; his finished busts often had an item of real jewelry or the like, contrasting with the white marble.

Plaster Bust of Mary Queen of Scots, one of the works that Carrier-Belleuse made for some manufacturer and never finished in marble or bronze.

One of the small bronzes made from a Carrier-Belleuse bust, which were and still are eminently collectible.

At his peak Carrier-Belleuse had a large studio and employed numerous assistants, notably Auguste Rodin; Rodin fans have played the game of trying to find Rodin's influence in Carrier-Belleuse pieces of the 1870s. Portrait of a Woman, Thought to be Marguerite Bellanger.

Here's a fascinating work, The Triumph of Silenus. Silenus was a sort of troll-like follower of Bacchus who had only a minor role in ancient myth but appears in many ancient works of art, presumably because portraying him gave sculptors and painters a chance to try something fun and ugly rather than serious and beautiful. He played the same role for many nineteenth-century artists.

Leda and the Swan.

Portrait of Alexandre Pieyre.

I'm not in the mood for fountains and equestrian portraits of generals, although Carrier-Belleuse did both. You can easily find them online if you're curious. What grabs me are these charming busts of women real and imaginary.